E-commerce websites provide users with merchandise information for merchandise bought or sold online. A user typically searches for the relevant merchandise on the e-commerce website by inputting search key words. The e-commerce website, in accordance with search key words input by the user, outputs links to the relevant merchandise pages for the user, and recommends reasonable categories for the user so that the user can easily find the merchandise that he needs among the merchandise included in the user-selected categories. The guided search tends to be more efficient for the user.
In the prior art, category information provided to the user can be provided through real-time queries. FIG. 1 is a flow chart illustrating an example process used by existing systems to provide category information.
Step 11: user-input key word sets are received. As an example, a key word set input by the user is “solid color hat.”
Step 12: Look up the merchandise identifiers containing these key words among the merchandise identifiers for all merchandise. As an example, it is assumed that a total of 508 merchandise identifiers containing the keywords “solid color hat” were found.
Step 13: determine different category information corresponding to the merchandise identifiers. If the category information corresponding to the 508 merchandise identifiers includes “Hat” and “Women's Apparel,” then the determined category information includes “Hat” and “Women's Apparel.” Such category information may be preconfigured. For example, the seller may set the category information for certain merchandise at the time the seller configures the merchandise for sale on the given website.
Step 14: determine the quantity of merchandise identifiers, among the merchandise identifiers that were found, corresponding to each piece of determined category information. If, for example, the category information for 192 of the 508 merchandise identifiers that were found is “Hat,” and “Women's Apparel” is found for the other 316 merchandise identifiers, then the determined quantity for the category information “Hat” will be 192 and the determined quantity for the category information “Women's Apparel” will be 316.
Step 15: provide the user with each piece of category information that has been determined together with the corresponding determined quantity. For example, the user is provided with “Hat” (192) and “Women's Apparel” (316).
However, in the method described above, the e-commerce website needs to conduct merchandise identifier searches and determine category information in real-time based on the key words input by the user. The technique will consume a lot of processing resources and processing efficiency will be lower.
To address the problem described above, some systems use a form of reference word table. FIG. 2 is a flowchart illustrating an example process for providing category information that uses reference word table.
Step 21: when a user clicks on a merchandise link in the list of search results, the current key words input by the user and the category information for that merchandise are stored.
Step 22: perform a simple gathering procedure on the stored key words and category information, and determine the key words whose search frequency within a specified period of time are higher than that of a specified threshold value. For example, this step determines which key words have more than 30 searches during one week.
Step 23: form a word reference table from the correspondence that was determined between the key words and the category information. In this table, each key word corresponds to at least one piece of category information.
Step 24: when a user subsequently inputs key words to search for merchandise, look up, based on the key words input by the user, the category information corresponding to the key words input by the user in the stored reference word table.
Step 25: provide the located category information to the user.
In the above process, when providing the user with category information based on a reference word table, the reference word table contains only the correspondences between category information and key words with higher user search frequencies. Key words that have lower user search frequencies are referred to as low-frequency search key words or long-tail key words. Since the reference word table does not store long-tail key words and their corresponding category information, it is difficult to respond with pertinent category information when the key word input by a user is a long-tail key word.